Hey All,
I wanted to throw some thoughts out there in the forumsphere and see what people are thinking on this subject--hopefully stimulate a little conversation. Mainly, I wanted to make my case that I believe that Matte Painters should be "Problem Solvers". That is where matte painting does/will thrive in the industry and people should point their professional aspirations and goals in that direction.

This is what I am thinking, so if you would follow me on along this thought that would be great. There 2 groups of people that I see currently see in the film industry "Content Creators" and "Content Finishers".

The content creators are the modelers, texture artists and the lighters. They collectively create content. Compositors are the content finishers. Compers collect all the different content that has been created and finish shots. These lines are pretty well defined but there is some cross over. Some good Compositors will get into creating content within the realm of Nuke and some lighters will precomp their lighting. But lighting's main job is to create content and Comp's main job is to finish content.

When you are talking about creative problem solving the content creators and content finishers are good problem solvers in their polarized areas. But there is this big area in between that has a huge potential for providing solutions--the problem is there is not a lot of people that are in this in between area.

Let me give you some examples to illustrate. If comp needed some content that was not provided by the content creators would they model, texture, light and render something? No, that is not generally done.

On the content creation side, each area: modeling, textureing, lighting is so compartmentalized in a large pipeline that there are very few people (if any) who could take an asset all the way from start to finish. And they would not generally be well acquainted enough with the finishing tools to provide solutions on that end.

I believe Matte Painters fills that gap between the content creators and content finishers. Matte Painters main purpose is actually to do both create and finish content. Matte Painters are in a great position to provide creative solutions. There are many times where myself or a colleague has come up with a solutions that neither the content creators or content finishers where able to come up with. Matte Painters are in a position to do that when they are well versed and have the range in both the artistic and the technical--providing solutions with both areas in mind. Matte Painters that are able to do this, I believe, are the most successful. Thay are the ones that make the matte painting approch so indispensable to companies, that it makes more jobs for matte painters everywhere.

So that is my pitch. Thanks for reading. :)
Garrett Fry

ngiassullo

06-21-2012 01:25 PM

Great post! When I was at a company we decided to do a multi-camera projection on a foreground object, where the camera moved about 180° around that object; then we rendered out a quick spec, lighting, and depth pass for the comps to play with. The major benefit was that it ended up saving a lot of time rather than taking the shot through texture then lighting.

What would've been even cooler was to take our projection(s) into mari and bake them to the geo and then take the detailing of the mp even further within mari since the object was so close to the cam.